Share This!We’re guessing that unlike the Tiki Room Birds who are here every day, these new limited-edition SHAG Mouse Ears will be a hot seller. They are priced at $58 (which is a relative bargain compared with some other releases we’ve seen). Even better, they’re really cute. You can find these throughout Disney Parks and on the ShopDisney website. What do you think of these? Let us know in the comments.

28 September 2007When South Africa takes to the field in their final Rugby World Cup Pool A match against the United States in Montpellier on Sunday, Jake White will reach the 50-match milestone as Springbok coach, the first man to achieve the feat.A victory over the Americans would lift White’s winning percentage to 64 percent, third among coaches since South Africa rejoined world rugby in 1992. Difficult startWhen the former Jeppe schoolmaster took over the reins of the Springbok side, it was at a low point in the team’s fortunes; they had exited the 2003 World Cup at the quarterfinals’ stage, beaten 29-9 by New Zealand, and the Boks’ image was under the spotlight after the controversial Kamp Staaldraad became public knowledge.White, though, was eager to take on the challenge of one of the toughest coaching jobs in South Africa, assuming a position that had claimed a fair number of victims, as coaches left the post before their contracts were up.One of his first messages to the players was that they were going to win the World Cup in 2007. Now, four years on, and after nearly having lost his job at the end of 2006, White is in charge of a confident team, one that many experts believe is the only side capable of challenging New Zealand for World Cup glory.Outstanding performancesWith the quarterfinals approaching, two matches stand out as outstanding performances at the 2007 World Cup: the All Blacks’ 76-14 humbling of Italy, and, arguably more impressive, the Springboks’ 36-0 whitewash of defending champions England.The Kiwis, in their win, showed a fantastic cutting edge, while South Africa, in their victory, exhibited powerful, controlled, and focused form.The lightly-regarded Americans, winless so far, and facing what is close to a full strength Bok line-up, aren’t expected to cause White’s men many problems. The coach has his team in the exact position he wants them to be in, and a win will likely mean a match against Wales in the last eight.PlayoffsShould South Africa beat the Welsh – and they have previously lost only once to Wales – they will tackle either France or Argentina in the semi-finals.The French have provided the Springboks with some tough matches in the past, but the Pumas have never beaten them, although the South American Jaguars, comprised most of Argentinian players, once beat the Boks 21-12 in Bloemfontein in 1982, with the legendary Hugo Porta scoring all his team’s points.Sunday’s match will be only the third between South Africa and the USA. In the two previous encounters, SA won 38-7 in 1981 and 43-20 in 2001, both times on American soil.Team selectionCoach White and his fellow selectors have opted for a lineup that closely mirrors the one that overpowered England.There is one change in the backline, with Akona Ndungane getting his first run of the tournament after overcoming a chest injury. He replaces JP Pietersen, who moves to the bench.Up front, Schalk Burger returns to action, having served his two-match ban for a dangerous tackle against Samoa. He, however, won’t be in action in his regular position on the flank. Instead, he will pack down at number-eight.Juan Smith, his regular partner at flank, will join forces with the industrious Wikus van Heerden.Albert van den BergIn a somewhat surprising move, White has opted to break up the Blue Bulls’ dominating second row, selecting Victor Matfield, but partnering him with Albert van den Berg and not Bakkies Botha.Van den Berg, who made his Springbok debut way back in 1999 against New Zealand, will win his 50th Springbok cap.Os du Randt, when he takes on the Eagles, will have played against more countries than any other Springbok; it will be the 18th nation he faces, breaking a tie with Joost van der Westhuizen.First-choice teamIn the Boks’ last outing, a 30-25 victory over Tonga, it became clear that there is a distinct difference between the first-choice lineup and the second-choice team, especially when one remembers the struggles of a similar selection against Irish side Connacht, a match that SA won only 18-0.The bench, boasting an incredible 311 caps, helped quell the Tongan bid to upset the hierarchy of world rugby, and all the players who served as substitutes in that match will start on Sunday. In total, there are 586 caps among the starters and 185 among the reserves.Starting FifteenPercy Montgomery, Akona Ndungane, Jaque Fourie, Francois Steyn, Bryan Habana, Butch James Fourie du Preez, Schalk Burger, Juan Smith, Wikus van Heerden, Victor Matfield, Albert van den Berg, BJ Botha, John Smit (c), and Os du RandtBenchBismarck du Plessis, CJ van der Linde, Bakkies Botha, Bob Skinstad, Ruan Pienaar, Andre Pretorius, and JP Pietersen Want to use this article in your publication or on your website?See: Using SAinfo materialread more

Cloudera has long been seen as a potential acquisition target. Last year GigaOm’s Derrick Harris questioned whether Cloudera was allying its way to an acquisition. Earlier this year RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor wrote that it was “highly likely” that HP would make a play for Cloudera.This week Cloudera entered a new alliance with Dell to offer a pre-configured stack of hardware and software for running Apache Hadoop clusters. Also, last year Dell fought a bidding war with HP over storage vendor 3Par. HP ending up winning even after Dell released a press release stating that it would acquire 3Par. That’s got to smart.Do you think Dell will make a play for Cloudera? Top Reasons to Go With Managed WordPress Hosting A Web Developer’s New Best Friend is the AI Wai… Related Posts klint finley 8 Best WordPress Hosting Solutions on the Market Tags:#cloud#Products Why Tech Companies Need Simpler Terms of Servic…read more

The English Premier League is the only league among the 24 that are part of FiveThirtyEight’s club soccer predictions that has six teams in the top 20 of the global team rankings (although it has no teams in the overall top five). However, these rankings suggest that the Premier League’s also-rans would not compete particularly well with the mid-table of other major leagues. Everton, the seventh EPL side, sit 47th. This places the Toffees behind 10 German Bundesliga clubs and 13 teams from La Liga. Even Atalanta, the seventh club in Italy’s Serie A, places above Everton.To explain why this happens requires some discussion of the method itself. League strength is compared in two ways; first, based on how well clubs from different leagues have done in direct competition with one another, such as in the Champions League. And second, the estimated market value of a team’s players, drawn from the website Transfermarkt. The former factor — head-to-head competition — receives much more emphasis when leagues play each other frequently, as teams from the top European leagues do in the Champions League and Europa League. That gives the big European leagues a more natural hierarchy.The relatively poor showing of the Premier League, compared with La Liga and the Bundesliga, is notable particularly because of the massive economic advantage that the English league holds over its continental competitors. The Premier League’s domestic TV contract pays in the range of a billion dollars more per year than Spain’s or Germany’s.1The new domestic Premier League TV contract is estimated to be worth $2.20 billion per year, compared with $1.04 billion for La Liga and $1.36 billion for the Bundesliga. The estimated values of Premier League clubs run about 20 percent higher than the values of clubs in the Bundesliga or Serie A and about 10 percent higher than La Liga. But these values have not translated into strong performances by Premier League teams in European competition. Judged over recent inter-league competition, La Liga’s performance has been about 27 percent better than the Premier League’s, while the Bundesliga’s performance has been 20 percent better. Despite its financial advantage, the Premier League has won only one European Cup in the past four years, compared with seven for La Liga sides. During that time, 19 teams from La Liga have advanced to the quarterfinals of the Europa or Champions League, and 10 Bundesliga sides have done the same. Only six Premier League clubs, barely more than one per year, have advanced to the final eight of the major club competitions.Just as Premier League sides come in below similar clubs from Germany and Spain because of the English league’s struggles in European competition, the continuing failure of MLS clubs to advance in the CONCACAF Champions League leaves American and Canadian sides behind the best teams in Mexico. Other than Toronto FC (171st), no MLS side places above the top 10 teams from Liga MX.The rankings further suggest that the best clubs from South America, such as Argentina’s Boca Juniors (81st) and Brazil’s Corinthians (88th) and Cruzeiro (99th) could hang with the teams at the bottom of the Premier League such as Watford (93rd) and Crystal Palace (102nd). Meanwhile, MLS teams would generally fall in either the second or third divisions in the English pyramid. NYCFC — the second-highest ranking MLS side, at 259th — rates below the top 10 teams in the Championship.MLS still has a long way to go to match up with the top levels of club soccer. These ratings and rankings will move as the various international tournaments play out through the fall, winter and spring. If sides from the Premier League or MLS mean to move up the rankings, they will need to have better results in direct competition with sides from other leagues. When comparing club soccer teams, it’s fairly easy to figure out who is the best of the best. The most talented players in the world play in a handful of European leagues, and the best teams of these leagues face off each year in the Champions League.Judging below this level is more difficult.How do you compare the English club Arsenal, which got through the group stage of the most recent Champions League but lost in the first round of the knockouts, with Celta Vigo of Spain, a semifinalist in the Europa League? And what about the European teams that didn’t play anyone outside their nation’s borders — like Stoke City in England and Freiburg in Germany?Even more difficult is comparing across continents. How well would the best MLS clubs do if they played in the Championship, the English second division?FiveThirtyEight has a new way of answering these questions. The global club soccer rankings compare 426 men’s teams that compete in leagues across Europe, North America and South America. As you might expect, the top three are Real Madrid of Spain’s La Liga, Bayern Munich of Germany’s Bundesliga and Barcelona, also of La Liga. It gets more interesting from there.read more

Ohio State sophomore forward Deshaun Thomas is a shooter, but not in the same way Jon Diebler, former OSU guard and all-time Big Ten leader in made three pointers, was. Thomas is a shooter because he likes to shoot – a lot. In high school, Thomas shot whenever he wanted because that’s what his team asked him to do. When he graduated, he was the No. 3-leading scorer in the history of the basketball-rich state of Indiana. So when Thomas came to OSU as a freshman, Thomas did what he had always done. He kept shooting. He was shooting so much that coach Thad Matta had to tell him to slow down, but at the same time he didn’t want to discourage Thomas to the point that he lost confidence. “He’s one of the best scorers in the nation,” OSU sophomore forward James “JD” Weatherspoon said. “You can’t take that away from his game. He’s going to knock down shots. It’s what he does.” Thomas averaged 7.5 points a game in an average of 14 minutes of action as a freshman last year. His ability to score a high volume of points in a short amount of time earned him the nickname of “microwave offense.” This year, with the departure of seniors Diebler, David Lighty and Dallas Lauderdale, who started the majority of the games last year, Thomas plans to step into a starting role for the upcoming season. It’s a role Matta, along with Thomas’s teammates, said he’s grown to accept. “He’s got a much better understanding of how to play,” Matta said. “He understands the importance of the defensive end of it. He understands the importance of the pass, the moving, the rebounding. I’ve been very, very pleased with his progress.” Matta also said Thomas has learned about when to shoot and when to pass. “The other day in the workout he threw a pass away and one of the coaches started to say something,” Matta said. “I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. He passed. I’ll teach him how to connect the dots.’” Senior guard William Buford laughed when asked about Thomas shooting too much, but said it was a thing of the past. “No, not no more,” Buford said. “He used to. You know he used to. He’s learning like what’s a good shot, what’s a bad shot. He’s passing more. He’s just a smarter basketball player.” But that doesn’t mean Thomas is going to stop shooting anytime soon or ditch the “microwave” mentality. Thomas embraces it. “I’m going to go out like everybody call me — the microwave,” Thomas said. “I’m trying to heat up at any minute so I’m just going to be the same old me with more time out there and having fun.” More than just shooting, Thomas has worked on the physical aspect of the game as well and has taken full advantage of the Buckeyes’ offseason-conditioning program, Matta said the changes are noticeable. “You can obviously look at him and tell a lot of things have happened to him over the summer,” Matta said. “It’s amazing how he looks this year compared to how he looked last year.” The Buckeyes open their season Nov. 11 against Wright State at 9 p.m. and with the beginning of a new season, Thomas said he’s ready to begin his next chapter too. “I’m here to show everybody what I really got,” Thomas said.read more

Werder Bremen have announced that their young midfielder Idrissa Toure has completed his season-long loan move to Juventus with the option of making the move permanent next yearThe 20-year-old was only signed by the Bundesliga outfit last summer after spells in the reserve team with both RB Leipzig and, more recently, FC Schalke 04.The only senior-level appearance Toure has to his name came in a brief cameo for Leipzig in the second division in Germany during the 2015/16 season.Now Toure will take his talents over to Juventus’ reserve team in Serie C, where he hopes to make a lasting impression on the Italian giants so that they will take up their option to sign him permanently next season.“Idrissa should train regularly with the first team and get minutes for the second team. It’s a very good opportunity for him to develop at the highest level,” Werder sporting director Frank Baumann told the club website.Fiorentina owner: “Ribery played better than Ronaldo!” Andrew Smyth – September 14, 2019 Fiorentina owner Rocco Commisso was left gushing over Franck Ribery’s performance against Juventus, which he rates above that of even Cristiano Ronaldo’s.Toure made 35 appearances for Bremen in the third division last season and managed to score two goals.Idrissa #Toure has signed for Italian champions @juventusfcen on loan with an option to buy.We wish you all the best in Turin, Idrissa! ?? #werder pic.twitter.com/cgBOBBatGg— SV Werder Bremen EN (@werderbremen_en) August 3, 2018read more

Liverpool midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum has revealed manager Jurgen Klopp is stopping the players from being distracted by Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City.The Reds are currently top of the Premier League, six points above second place Spurs with City having slipped to third after back-to-back defeats.Klopp has spoken of his players focusing on their on game and Wijnaldum says the team will not be distracted by what other teams are doing.“When we played Wolves away (the Friday before Christmas) a lot of the players didn’t even know who City or Tottenham were playing,” he said, according to Sky Sports.“We were just focused on our own game and trying to get the most out of that one. That is why it goes so well.”“We are only focused on the things we can control. We can control our own performance. We are only busy with that.”Crouch: Liverpool could beat Man United to Jadon Sancho Andrew Smyth – September 14, 2019 Peter Crouch wouldn’t be surprised to see Jadon Sancho end up at Liverpool one day instead of his long-term pursuers Manchester United.“If you are maybe less focused than normal, then you have a manager in Jurgen who will tell you directly that there is no space for doing less or enjoying things too much. He says keep both feet on the ground.”read more

Recommended for you Facebook Twitter Google+LinkedInPinterestWhatsApp Related Items:bahamas, business, inspection, ministry of finance, vat, warning Facebook Twitter Google+LinkedInPinterestWhatsAppNassau, 08 Jan 2014 – The government of the Bahamas is warning business owners to explain themselves and the new Value Added Tax better to consumers. The Ministry of Finance today issued warning in letters to those companies not displaying the VAT inclusive price to the customer and says, if there is still resistance to the warning then there will be fines leveled against these businesses. Bahamians are adjusting and in some cases not so well to the added 7.5% they are expected to pay for products and services with the January 1st, 2015 implementation of this new tax regime.It is the first time for VAT in The Bahamas and the concerns have been varied but widespread; even the threat of losing some tourism business is looming. Nonetheless, government forged ahead with the program and rejuvenated its Price Control Agency to watch for price gouging.In a statement earlier today, the VAT Department explained it is doing its part to protect consumers and shared that there are already warning letters out for registrants who may be making incorrect calculations. Consumers are entitled to refunds if the amounts identified as “tax” or “VAT” exceed 7.5%. In addition, retail businesses are not allowed to disclose as taxes, charges that are not VAT. Add to this, companies incomplete their registration process are advised not to be caught collecting VAT.One gouger jumped as high as 17.5% on the cost of movie tickets.The Department’s advice to consumers: “…challenge assertions which convey impressions that VAT is a significant cost for registered business. The tax is directly borne by consumers. When paid by the VAT registrant it is recoverable as credits.”From The Bahamas, Deandrea Hamilton reporting for One Caribbean News. Bahamian music legend gunned down at home in Turks and Caicos Bi-lateral talks with Bahamas to resume, UK gives green light to high-level TCI delegation Hurricane Jose Not A Threat to The Bahamas, For Nowread more

England head coach Gareth Southgate believes Raheem Sterling is finally ready to fulfill his potential for England after conquering his national team drought with his brace in the victory over Spain.The Manchester City forward excelled as he scored twice to inspire last month’s impressive 3-2 victory against La Furia Roja in the UEFA Nations League, and since then has scored three in four for his club side, who this week awarded him a new five-year deal.Following four in 11 for club and country before then the only consistent criticism has been his lack of killer instinct in front of goal, something he appears to have been convincingly overcome.“That (against Spain) was a big psychological barrier overcome and he has continued that form with his club over the last few weeks,” said Southgate, according to BT Sport.“We are really looking forward to seeing him again next week.”Crouch: Liverpool could beat Man United to Jadon Sancho Andrew Smyth – September 14, 2019 Peter Crouch wouldn’t be surprised to see Jadon Sancho end up at Liverpool one day instead of his long-term pursuers Manchester United.“I am really pleased for him because he is in outstanding form. He had an outstanding performance against Southampton. We have got huge belief in him and that belief in his own game is coming now.”“We have been happy with his performances for a long time and the missing piece has been the goals; you can see what it meant to him in Seville to get the goals which he has been overdue with us.”“In any sport you’re at your best when you’re playing without thinking too much and that’s what he did.”“He got his chance and just hit it; he didn’t have an extra touch or wait an extra half-a-second or millisecond, he just hit things and that’s why he scored the goals he did. You want all players to be free of overthinking; that’s when they’re in a good place and a good flow.”read more